So What? Last Minute Sales Tips

Well, happy Thursday. Welcome to December. It is officially December, December 2nd, as we are live streaming this. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show. With it being December and end of the year, what we wanted to cover today was last-minute sales tips.

So you're probably getting all of the emails in your inbox of hey, just want to send you a thing, or hey, can we set up a meeting? More so than you do throughout the whole entire year. So tis the season to unsubscribe and block everybody from your inbox. That said, if you are still looking to, you know, meet your quotas, what we wanted to do today was especially talk with John. So John handles the business development for Trust Insights.

And John is, you know, for all intents and purposes, the least sleazy salesperson I've ever met in my entire life, which is why we felt very comfortable bringing him on, because at no point was I did I get that it factor from John selling. Trust me, John, these are these are words of praise, not uh anything negative. Uh you know, I I often describe you as the guy who can sell ice to an Eskimo uh because you have a really good sense of what do people need and how can you meet them where they are without that like hard in your face sell. So with that, with that lovely, you know, uh introduction that I just gave you, uh, we're covering uh a couple of things today. So where do you guys want to start?

That's it. Yeah, well, of course, we start with the fact that I am uh it's not that I am not sleazy, I am just the least sleazy people. Well, I mean, it's sales, so there's like a a little percentage of sleaze involved. There is, you know, and it has evolved a lot too, uh to be honest. It's has changed in so much now that sales has virtually no leverage, you know.

Uh even as early as like 10 years ago, sales still had some leverage. They had some control over pricing and the information that was out there and things like that. So they could hold you over a barrel, you know, and that's where all the great you know, sales stories come from the uh Glenn Gary Glenn Ross and all these places of people who can just will a deal to make happen if they just push somebody hard enough. And that's you know, that's just not the case. Um, but there's three fronts that I wanted to throw out there, um, which are you know, market.

There's one segment of uh business that can just do business now because they are attached to this time of year for one reason or another. The second are feature-related um products, you know, we we talk product marketing all the time, so I but I want to just say features so I'm not getting down that part product marketing rat hole. And then the third are manipulations, which are the things that you know, those are the unsubscribes, the you know, buy this week, get to free for the holiday kind of thing that are usually race to the bottom stuff and and cause all kinds of problems downstream. But you know, there are reasons to do that, and there is an upside to it. Um and yeah, I'd throw out too for anybody uh on the chat, if you want to throw in anything that you've received in the past couple weeks, if you've got any horrible offers or you know, stuff that either made you laugh or cry or take advantage of.

Um, I think my big one for this week has been uh John, we'd really love to have this executive on our podcast. And I know they'd be a perfect fit because I love your show, Six Pixels of Separation, which uh is not the podcast we do, but you know, so that that makes my uh wall of shame for this week. And so if you've got one, throw it out over there. Um you are not Canadian. I, you know, these things slip through.

Well, you had a killer one last week. You got some kind of bulk email I saw that like they missed everything. There was no subject line, there was no body to the message. It was just like a comp I, you know, I I totally give somebody uh, you know, I we've all been there, probably everybody here at on this panel, where you've sent something off and the link didn't work, or you know, one of the merge fields got munged on the way out. But to send something that's just like you know, to do a blank send, I I don't even know how the heck that would happen.

So I have to give them credit for that one. Well, you know what's funny? Uh I did get a follow-up to that email, and it said it was so it was around the timing of Thanksgiving. So it was like, sorry for the turkey of an email. And so it on the one hand, I was like, oh, well, you know, at least they're acknowledging.

But on the other hand, I was like, did they do it on purpose so that they could send that follow-up email and get extra attention in the inbox? And it's one of those things, like, unless I know the person personally, I'll never know the answer to it, but at least it got me wondering. So it was a different tactic I hadn't seen. The one, the one that I'm seeing sort of come through my inbox uh right now is um people pretending that they're sending the dear bracket first name. And then it's the just kidding.

And it's like, oh, but just please stop. Just like, what is it that you want? Just send me an email. Yeah, that's it. That's definitely like inside baseball.

You know, that's like, yeah, it's a joke to some marketing people, but it's just well, I always talk about how you know we created marketing over coffee because I already knew how successful marketing automation jokes were for my family at Thanksgiving, you know, they had no interest in any kind of marketing humor. And you know, you get burned on that. So yeah, and it is funny, you talk about um it used to be a sales thing and a marketing tech talking about the miraculous recovery, you know, where you screw something up, so that's your opportunity to come back now and like really that's a great customer service thing, too. You know, if you've kind of messed something up, go in and just fix it beyond their wildest dreams so they rave about it. But yeah, unfortunately, we we've become so um you know battle worn and suspicious of everything that yeah, now the now we just assume that's yet another stunt to send that second email, and you know, that we can't, you know, go with that.

I have a question for you guys before we dig in because I feel like this has been a shift over the past few years in terms of sales. And so, Chris, when you talk about sales and you talk about like cold calling, you talk about the smile and dial, which is literally someone picking up the phone and calling, but I feel like cold calling people doesn't work, it's not as effective anymore because number one, most of us are all at home, so you'd have to have a cell phone number versus a business line, and two, you know, John, we've spent the first five minutes of the show talking about emails, and so emails as the way in which people are connecting. I remember when I worked a few jobs ago and I was helping the sales team, I gave them a list of people to call, and the sales guy got really mad because he was like, 'Well, where are the email addresses? ' I'm like, they're not provided, but I have phone numbers for you. And he was unwilling to call people.

Uh so I guess I'm curious, both from your perspective of like, when did that change and why like why can't we just pick up the phone and call people? Why do we have to default to email first? Well, the simple answer is to why email is this, right? This this stuff, um, phones are expensive. Um, phone call and call sent just people getting on the phone, et cetera.

All that costs money, a lot of labor compared to just batch and blast sending out you know truckloads of email. Even if one tenth of one percent of people respond to your email, if you're sending you know, cranking out a million emails, you're still gonna see some results out of it for a much lower cost. Is it better? No. Um, to what John was saying originally, kind of a race to the bottom uh as to who can get the most attention.

I was counting through my emails earlier. And from Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, uh Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday had something close to 3,000 emails uh in my inbox, of which I deleted 2,997 of them. Um so everybody is starving for attention. The there is benefit doing cold calling. Um, if you know who it is you're calling, um, like you know they are 100% in your market.

And we do see with some parts of the population, it does work, right? You know, folks, at first for my parents' generation, people are cold calling them all the time, all the time. Um, and it does work to some degree. Yeah, one thing with that is that you know, cold calling, you do have to view it as marketing, right? I mean, those are really awareness campaigns.

You know, you're hoping to stumble upon somebody who doesn't know your brand well enough to search for you first. And there's definitely that age thing of you know, there's once you go below a certain age when digital divide um, you know, sprung up that they don't phone calls are viewed as an intrusion. I mean, if anything, you should be sending a text to warm up for a call so they expect it because you know, a lot of people just don't want to talk on the phone at all. Um there is seen work really well is direct mail. We've seen this with a couple of our clients now.

Direct postal mail targeted, you know, with to very specific segments actually works real well because you open up your inbox, there's 700 emails. So you open up your postal box, there's two bills and like some random postcard from your realtor, and that's it. So there's not a lot of attention you're competing for in the actual postal mailbox. Yeah, and that's you know, it definitely costs more to go that route. So you have to really be a lot more intelligent about who you want to mail to and where you want to go because there's a price tag attached, but yeah, it does get on the desk, which is you know a challenge these days.

So, John, one of the things we wanted to talk about was the difference between manipulation and product marketing. And so what are some of the what are some of the tips there? And I know we've sort of been talking about, you know, the kind of almost like the bait and switch emails or the attention grabbing emails that don't really tell you much. So, like for a last-minute sales tip, like what does someone need to be thinking about so that they're not going down the road of manipulation and really, you know, they're thinking more about the true product marketing. Yeah, and even so you've got product, you know, features are actually touching the the space versus manipul manipulations and the top end you actually have you know organizations where this is their market, right?

If you're selling Christmas trees, there's no better weekend than this weekend. You are this is as good as it's gonna get. So that's the the sweetest spot. If you've got something that's direct to the holiday, um that can, you know, that's the easy hit, the easy way to go. And at that point, you're doing normal business.

You really have no incentive to give too many discounts or do anything up front because you're you're on the mark. So then, yeah, next step is uh, you know, product marketing features. Does what you do match something that's going on in the holidays? And the you know, the greatest poster child for that is UPS and the postal service, right? They don't need the holiday season, but the holiday season is prime time for them to you know do a ton of business and it can, you know, that's got matches with retail, right?

You know, they're always open, but the holidays are going to be huge because it's just driving purchasing. Um so really, you know, for features for any company doing shipping, for example, speed of shipping is huge. If you're a day ahead of anybody else, people will pay a premium for that and you can take advantage of that and make that work. Um, we actually have features on that front. There's actually some things going on with that because there's a bunch of clients and organizations that ramp up their ad spend and their e-commerce activity during this time of year.

So that does give us a better angle to come at people and say, hey, you know, are you analyzing your holiday campaigns? Because it's even, you know, there are orgs that will not do a heavy batch of analysis on what they do year-round, but if their spend goes up 20 times, you know, for this month, it probably is worth diving in and doing a bit more analysis on that to see what's working. Um, and then yeah, the last is manipulations. I mean, that's when you're just doing any kind of offer or freebie price break, anything, you know, just making noise to attract somebody's attention. And the real trade-off there, you know, you are going to be taking a hit on margin.

So you have to decide is getting attention, you know, doing that marketing worth what you're going to lose. And then there's also, you know, a tough long-term play there, whereas most companies are willing to sacrifice everything for a quarter, you know, you get this crazy thing like we have with Adobe where everybody's forwarding around all these messages saying, hey, today's the day you go cancel your Adobe and re-sign up because you know, you can save 600 bucks a year. Well, no, it's not 600, what you take up about 30 a month. So yeah, 300, over 300 bucks a year. Um like that's a classic manipulation.

You know, it has nothing to do with the holidays. It's just, hey, it's Black Friday, so we're gonna try and get some action and excitement built up. But in the long run, are you really killing your margins and getting yourself burned? Um, and then on top of that, there's a whole nother level of stuff in that there's all this holiday hype, like that's one thing, you know, basically this beefed up retail season. But the other thing at play is year end.

So you've got a lot of organizations that are dealing with their budgets and uh there's two big camps there. There's the people that have money to burn, you know, and they need to burn it up in one way, shape, or form, because otherwise it won't be in their budget next year. And then there's the other camp of people that are trying to map out their planning and spending for next year. And is there can be opportunity for you there as far as hey, if you lock in now for next year, we can give you a better price, or you know, there's a bunch of things to do on that front. But that's the you know, the whole thing.

So if you can be in the market, if you can't at least be in the market, try and do something that delivers more value to the customer, and then yeah, worst case scenario, just start offering 20% off and buy one, get one free and hope you don't burn the place to the ground. Well, you know, it's funny with the I I've been thinking through with the kind of services that we offer, it's hard for us to jump on that, you know, Black Friday, small business Saturday, you know, Cyber Monday, you know, and offer like, hey, buy one predictive report, get one half off without thinking through sort of number one, the precedent that it sets that like these things are devalued uh just for this time of year, but you're still getting the same amount of work from us, and so we're taking a hit. Um, but then also sort of you know, I can't imagine you know, going out with that hard sell of like, hey, I know you have money to burn by the end of the year, why don't you burn it with us? We can figure out something to do. And so, in a perfect world, like you could be that direct with people and be like, I know that you know that we know you have money that you need to spend, and why don't you just go ahead and spend it with us and we'll do some cool things for you?

I guess my so this is why I'm not a salesperson, by the way. Um, this is why I'm not allowed to touch sales, but that would be that would be my approach, is like, so I know you have money, I know you need to spend it. Why don't you spend it with us? And I guarantee you're gonna get some cool stuff out of it. That is the pitch.

I mean, yeah, it's you know, that is kind of getting to hardcore sales and deal making, as far as you know, going to someone who has no intention of you know doing business with you this month and talking them into it. Um, and so then it's really a matter of how much trust have you established. And you know, we're in a position that's always been our long-term approach in that, yeah, I have a list of people who have been banging around the site for the last three months. You know, they've you've been looking at every single white paper and downloading every single thing. And those are the people that I'd go with first saying, hey, you know, it's year end, obviously you're interested in doing some cool stuff.

You know, can we sit down and talk about what you're planning for next year? So it, you know, that is that's definitely an opening. That's a real sales activity and opening. And you know, we've done some interesting stuff, whether you know intentionally or not, but like Chris has a great LinkedIn paper out there, a LinkedIn resource about you know how to get your resume ready to change jobs. And that's a great red flag.

If I see somebody downloading everything, but they also download the I want to change my job, you know that this person is not, you know, that they're not gonna be able to find that extra 20K at the end of the year. They're they're obviously looking to go someplace. So um, but that's a huge thing, you know, the the trust you've established and the ability to know what resources they've been looking at or what they've been doing to get a feel for, hey, is this something that they're gonna want for next year or someplace that they want to go. Well, and I think you bring up a really good point, which is you know, something that we always come back to is using the data that you have first in order to determine what to do next. And so you're talking about the CRM data, and ideally your CRM is set up in such a way that you can track the pages that people visit on your website, the amount of activity, the you know, how much they spent, how interested they are in your stuff.

And you have maybe some sort of a scoring system set up. And so I think one of the mistakes that we see people do is just send out an end of the year blast to everybody on their list without any kind of segmentation to say, hey, you know, we have this end of year deal or you know, whatever the thing is, the sales email, without really thinking through where is this person in their journey? And can we break out into smaller buckets? Okay, these people are still just purely awareness. So we just need to continue to let them know who we are and what we do.

These people have been with us for more than six months and they visited 10 pages on our website and they come back to see us every day. So maybe they're getting ready to do something. And then these people, this is something else we talked about, you know, maybe have approached us, but maybe at the time they didn't have the money, or maybe for some other reason we didn't win the business. And so that to me, those are three distinct buckets of people that you could be reaching out to in three different ways. Yeah, and the the pricing one is an interesting one.

That's a whole thing, you know, rather than doing a fire sale, you know, I do have the list of deals that did not close this year, and this is a perfect opportunity to get a better feel for what, you know, was it a perception of value, or is it they just don't have budget? You know, I can go back on specific deals and say, look, if we had been able to do this for X instead of the price that was originally put up there, would you have been able to do this or not? And I don't even have to offer it to them. I can just say, hey, you know, if it had been this, would it have worked? Because we're just trying to figure out and what you find is with a lot of orgs, it's just that the person working on the project didn't have the authority.

You know, they wanted to do some cool stuff, but when it ultimately came down to it, when they went asking for the money, they can't get it because they just and it's not even that the money's not there, it's just that the person above them is not going to give it to them. So um it's a good opportunity to get a better feel for a lot of prospects was, you know, was it budget? Was it authority? Why did that exactly not work? Um, and then you know, there may be some mismatches too.

You know, there's stuff where I mean ultimately the buyer does determine the value, right? I mean, they're the ones that say yes or no. I mean, we can put the pricing out there, but if the buyer doesn't bite, then the value isn't there for them. And it's a question of and see, there's this weird inverse relationship for us, and that if they were just a bigger organization, the value would be there. You know, it's like when we look at our digital customer journey reports, you know, when you're measuring customer experience, well, if you're a 10 million dollar business, you know, there's not going to be much of anything that you can do that's gonna justify you spending 100 grand on something.

Whereas if you're a hundred million dollar business, there's a lot of places you could probably drop a hundred grand and have positive ROI. So, you know, unfortunately, every prospect is unique and the value is going to be different for them. And yeah, that's you know, really the job of sales these days is sorting through all those piles and trying to find the prospects where there's values on both sides and they have the ability to get it done. Um Chris, you look like you're contemplating what is if I said to you, I need you to find 20,000 in deals in the next three weeks, what would your approach be? Uh, probably bank robbery.

Okay, let's confine it down to things that are legal and moral for the company. I don't know that you can. Uh yeah. One of the things that the Ehrenberg Bass Institute came out with earlier this year, which is part of the LinkedIn Business Institute, is saying that, you know, 95 to 90% of your buyers are not in market at any given time. And no matter how hard you push, if somebody can't buy, they're not going to buy, particularly in B2B, but even you know, even in high value B2C, right?

Like, yeah, you could probably push somebody to buy an extra pack of gum. Uh, you could probably push somebody to buy a carton juice that you know they've never tried before. You're it's gonna be hard to push them to buy a car. Uh it's gonna be hard to push them to buy a college tuition or a house. Um, and so the better question, which you alluded to, Katie, with CRM is what data do you have that are buying signals?

Uh, and are you keeping an eye on them? And do you know what those you know buying signals are? John, you talked about you know the activity level is certainly one of them. One that actually came to mind while you were talking about what John is talking about is um we don't ever really, and I don't think this is something we'd have to build this is measuring changes in activity velocity, like hey, suddenly this person's picking up, you know, there's more hits faster from this person, and you know, this person slowed down, they're not downloading as much. Um, and then seeing, okay, if a velocity change is occurring, you know, we have to you go back test the old data and say, like, did a velocity change occur before X client closed?

Uh and if so, is that a reliable indicator that you know the velocity of activity might be an indicator of sales? And if that would be an area that I would think to you would have to do a heck of a lot of coding to pull it together. Um, I know there are some marketing automation packages and ABM packages that can do that. Uh, they are, of course, reassuringly expensive. Um, but if you're, you know, selling million dollar deals, it's uh it's worth it.

Um but yeah, the big thing is knowing where people are in their journey. You know, one of the things that we kind of assume, and it it actually was something I was thinking about earlier, was when we talk about year end, that really only applies to companies for whose fiscal year ends with the calendar, right? Every there's so many companies that they close the year in different quarters. Um and I can't say that I've ever seen a calendar, like, for example, by industry of which, you know, the probability that a company uh hasn't uh a non-calendar year close. So for example, like uh if you work with the US government, the fiscal year starts July 1.

So anything that's government related, you have essentially June, you know, the month of June is there, December. Um, and that may be when the used or lose it money is floating around. So uh one thing I would be curious to know, and if folks uh who are tuning in have any insight into this is there good data on it per industry level about when different fiscal years close. Yeah, that's a great question because it not only do you have the use it or lose it thing, you also have the you know, the two months before a year end is the budgeting cycle, and everybody's trying to figure out you know, they have to have a plan. And so you may not be able to close stuff at the end of the year, but you could be teeing a bunch of stuff to close in the first or second month.

And you know, of course, the coffers are full in month one and two, so that's when you tend to see all these whales flow through and the sales reps take their summer, late summer vacation when they finally get their checks on the stuff that they've been working on since you know the October before. Um, but you know, lining that up and giving prospects a plan, that's that's kind of the flip one. Instead of the burning the money today, it's okay. Let us come in and help you with your strategic plan for next year. You know, do you have a vision of where you're gonna go over the next 12 months and how are you going to check in on every quarter and being able to put together an annual package?

And we see this all the time with our renewals, right? It's we've been doing all this work for you. Okay, now let's figure out what the next 12 months are going to look like. And you know, putting together that plan. And yeah, the payments can go either way.

You know, some morgues are like, yeah, let's squeeze that first payment back into this fiscal year so we can cover that, and others will be like, no, let's you know, roll it forward because it needs to be part of that established budget for next year. What are your thoughts on, especially, you know, again, where we are sitting squarely in B2B. Um, what are your thoughts on things like free trials and giving things away for free in order to bring in potential customers and then sort of saying, okay, you've gotten this thing for free. Now, after a month, you have to start paying for it. Like, is that a viable tactic for companies like ours?

Yeah, well, the the question with that is it because the dynamics of the B2B market have just changed so much, right? There's this whole swath of companies who don't care if they lose money every single quarter. You know, there's companies that are just like, hey, adoption and happy customers, that's the currency that we need to get the next round of investment and to get to IPO. And so they really don't care about losing money every single quarter as long as the users continue to go up and you get more people on board. So, yeah, there is well, a very interesting and important part of that for us is the crazy thing is that anything we give away for free or a discount, we need to be giving away to people who don't need the discount.

Like that's the biggest challenge for us is that we have a lot of single person shops and entrepreneurs and people that they're never gonna have the budget, but they would take the free thing and it would be worth doing. So it's very important for us to say, okay, no, these are the companies that can afford to pay 60, 100, 200 grand a year for ongoing reporting across all this front. But we're really just giving stuff away to get in the door and because risk is their primary concern, right? They don't want to take any risk. They don't want to put any money out there and have to explain why they lost it or burned it.

So yeah, I mean, we could in theory do something like a hey, you sign up for the digital customer journey report for a year and you get the first one for free to prove that it works and that we can do it, but then you pay, and you know, it's just back end loaded. You know, they pay twice or three times as much for that report for the remaining three quarters. Um, and you know, you could limit some of your exposure to that in having them sign for the year up front and then they have an out at the end of the first quarter. But then the question becomes, you know, okay, so now well, we're gonna, you know, every quarter be doing three of these where we're doing the full labor up front for quarter one and we're rolling the dice on what happens with the back three quarters. You know, does our model support that and can we do that?

So yeah, that's an ongoing, you know, and really that's ultimately something that you have to judge and think about, Katie, is you know, how much risk do we take on these marketing programs and how many resources do we dump into it uh without guaranteed promise on the back end? Um, you know, if we were one of these companies where, like, yeah, we need to double revenue every year so that in six years we're acquired, then yeah, we'd be taking crazy risk and we'd probably also be talking to investors and doing a lot of insanity. And, you know, is it really in Trust Insight'sights best interest to just get on that treadmill that everybody else gets on? And you know, five years from now, we all hate the company. Like, do we want to go there?

What about things like? So let's say it's not a free report, but what about things like um, you know, 30 minutes of you know, marketing therapy? So you get a free 30 minutes with Chris or Katie or John to ask any questions that you can possibly fit into those 30 minutes, and we will talk through the solutions. Like, do you think that that is a tactic that works to demonstrate our expertise and our ability to solve problems, but also you know, to at least get people like thinking about you know who can help me with this thing or what problems do I even have. Yeah, those well going back to what John had said earlier, which I think is really important with that is it has to go that's the kind of thing you want to offer to people who have the ability to buy, right?

Because there are a ton of tire kickers who will never buy anything, right? You know, we we have a uh a list of names of people that you know, we like, oh yeah, when we hear from this person, we like them, they're nice person, but they are never going to buy anything. Um, and so when you're investing, it's it's still an investment, it's just a uh time investment to have a monetary investment. It's one of those things you've got to be very careful about who that goes out to. It it can't be a cattle call.

Yeah, and trust is a big part of that too. It's you know, because if we just do a generic, hey, get a free half hour with one of us, that's not the same as if somebody else says, Hey, you should sit down and talk to these guys for a half hour. Like that's a totally different thing. Um, and so yeah, that gets into you know, now you start to get more into biz dev, and that's kind of another place where sales is huge right now is like finding that list of five people who have budget who have problems, and if you say, hey, come get on the phone with us for a half hour because we want to talk to you specifically about these things we know are a problem for you, then that kind of lead gen stuff works. But yeah, it is tough.

Well, and in some ways uh to you know blow our own horn on, we're actually doing that pretty effectively right now, and that like anybody can schedule 30 minutes with me, but they don't get to talk to you guys unless I've talked to them and it makes sense for you guys to talk to them too, you know. And and so we do have that two-tiered, and and that does work pretty well. So I, you know, unfortunately, one of us gets to take the hit for the when the lug nuts call and ask you crazy questions about yeah, that that's a whole nother show, you know. It's like when I talk about people with like their model so that you know, by selling your Facebook data, you should be getting 50 grand a year. I'm like, well, yeah, that is a great idea in theory, but I don't see that happening in the next six months.

And you know, that's not the kind of project we're gonna jump on pro bono to help you get off the ground, you know. So um, but yeah, access and and being able to have meaningful discussions, that is right at the heart of you know, getting things going and and running with what about, and Chris, maybe this is more of a question for you, because I know this is something that you have really sort of doubled down on it. How do you activate or you know, sort of fish around in your online community? So one of the things that we're doing at Trust Insights is we're really working hard to build an online community, and you can join that community for free, and it's not as it's not we don't pitch you sales every single day or anything like that. Uh, we have channels dedicated.

You can join our free Slack group at Trustinsights.ai/slash analytics for marketers, but where does the online community fit into this sort of end-of-year? Hey, we need to get more business in the door, or even just any time of the year. A lot of that requires two things. One, it requires that people be having conversations on a regular and frequent basis that you stimulate those conversations to elicit need. Because if you are asking people on a regular basis, like, hey, have you tried this?

Has anyone heard of this? You know, ask questions about this. Over time, you build a profile of people, you get an understanding of you know, who's who keeps asking questions about Google Analytics? Who keeps asking about this or that? And you can get a sense of where that person's need is.

Um, so that when if you do want to do something, you know, sort of year-end, you can say, This person, this person, and this person. These are the three people that all year have been asking and saying, Hey, I'm struggling with this. Okay, great. Maybe you know, that's where to John's point, uh, you know, those sort of activations. I don't like calling them manipulations, but activations really come to say, like, hey, you've been asking about Google Analytics for like nine months now, and it's pretty clear you still have not gotten it fixed.

Would you like us to, you know, do you have an extra 20K in your budget? Do you want us to just come and fix it? So that's part one. And then part two is the community itself is and should be a really good retention tool to be able to say, like, hey, here's the value that you get out of being connected to connected with us. Here's uh a way for you to stay in touch with us.

And the ideal is it becomes a referral engine. So not the community, well, not only the community itself, but also for the company sponsoring it to say, like, hey, this company uh sponsors this community, and by the way, they know their stuff too. So join the community can talk with them and use it as a referral engine. That's not a year-end thing, that's not a a you know campaign-based thing. That's uh something that is momentum-based, you have to do on a on an ongoing basis, and as with all social media communities, you have to always provide more value than you take so that people see a reason to be in there.

But that said, if you know I wouldn't use it for something like year-end, but certainly if it was a a choice of hey, we can't stay in business without some help, um, then you know, all bets are off at that point. You you pull every every string available to you to see to see what you can have happen. For you know, more mundane, you know, make your year-end numbers. I think the the model of doing some advertising and then doing you know direct outreach, direct mail, direct email, direct messaging people is the way to go. If you if you know somebody has a need and you've just been watching them carefully, you know who they you know you need to talk to.

So I'm hearing some recurring themes that whether or not you guys are explicitly saying them, I'm gonna pull them out from what you've both been talking about. The number one thing is trust, and so trust has to go both ways. Number one, you have to trust that the people that you're reaching out to uh are the right people, and so that comes from your data analysis, it comes from the information that they have given you permission to collect about them, and number two, they need to trust you so that they're going to pick up the phone or answer their email or check their DMs, and so that to me is the thing that you can't just skip over. So when we're talking about sort of those last minute sales tips, you can't build trust last minute. That's a long game.

That's that relationship, that networking that Chris to your point, to give more than you get back. And so, John, and also you're talking about, you know, making sure that we're not wasting our time trying to capture people who are never going to have the budget. And so I feel like that for me has been underscored numerous times in this conversation of trust is the number one thing in order to make sales effective, to make it work, to make that business development work. Because if one side of the equation doesn't have that confidence that the person they're talking to has their best interest, it's not going to work. People aren't going to buy.

Or they're going to buy once and say, this was a terrible experience. I'm never going to buy from them again. I'm never going to work with them. And so I feel like that's the number one thing I'm hearing. The number two thing I'm hearing is, you know, there's really no, you know, quick quick win.

There's really no like quick and dirty way, like the, you know, Black Friday deals or the deep discounts. It might work in the immediate, but in the long term, it might actually be more harmful for your business. So that's sort of the second takeaway that I'm getting. You know, so those are the, I mean, those are two big things. You know, the other the third thing is you have to really understand your customer base and meet people where they are, where they are in the journey.

Are they just learning about you? Have they been with you for a while but never engaged? Have they engaged with you, but they're not ready to buy? Have they said they want to buy, but they don't have the budget? And so really tailoring those messages to people where they are versus just one sort of blanket blast to everybody saying, Hey, we're selling stuff.

Why don't you come buy it? So I guess those are the big things that I'm getting from this conversation is their last minute sales tips in terms of how to just not do sales poorly in general. Think about it this way. What if you said, what if somebody said, hey, I need to get married really fast. Like, how is that gonna end?

Right? When you think about it, it's like, okay, I mean there's there's there's ways to make that happen, you know. People in Las Vegas do it all the time. But in terms of the long-term value, you know, it's just like when we're talking about customers. If you acquire somebody as a customer, you know, just on purely on discounting, it's like the Bed Bath and Beyond problem.

Nobody shops at Bed, Bath and Beyond except when there's a sale, right? They've so conditioned their customers to say, like, only shop here when something's 40% off that they they can't get people to come in otherwise. And so if when you're looking at at all these different tactics to try to make sales happen, it's like trying to make a marriage happen. And yes, you do have to balance it with we need to stay in business and pay bills and things like that. Um but I don't think it's it's one of those things I think is tricky to accelerate.

Now I'm sure, and if you've you know, if you you're listening to this and you've had some proven successes in not only closing sales quickly, but having good long-term lifetime value from those customers, I would love to hear what that is. Because I think you can get a fast customer, I think you can get a good customer, but I don't necessarily think you get both at the same time. Yeah, you have to, you know, you have to be willing to take a hit. You know, if you want to give somebody some kind of tremendous value to them if they take action now, you know, you might be able to get them to move, but you pay a price for that. You know, that doesn't come free.

There's always uh something that comes back and bites you on that, whether it's cash flow or they churn, you know. I mean, the churn is a whole nother thing we could dig into. But I don't want to drag on too much, but we do have to say everything 40% off this week. So hurry up. No, I'm just kidding.

That's not happening. I guess that you know, the big takeaway if people are interested, is you know, you know, we can certainly help you with your end-of-year planning, your beginning of year planning, your middle of year planning, we can help you get your system set up, sort of fresh your fresh clean start for the new year, you know, whatever it is, you know, don't be afraid to reach out uh at any time is really the takeaway. And the best place to reach us is in our free slot community, analytics for marketers. The link is at the bottom of the uh screen, trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers, um, where you can join over 2,000 people who are talking about marketing and analytics and Google and AI, and you know, sometimes we're talking about the kind of music that we're listening to that day. It definitely widely varies depending on who you're talking to.

John, Chris, any last thoughts or any last you know, pro tips on just sales in general. It's you know, it's been a crazy year. Go reach out the end of the year in December at some point, thank your customers for doing business with them and just you know let that start some discussion. But that's uh the place to start. Yeah, I agree.

I think given the years of you know, not just this year, but last year as well, that we've all had, you know, it's what March 674, 2020. Um remembering that at the end we are all still just a bunch of people, and there is a lot of benefit into just reaching out and saying hi without necessarily buying intent. Just checking in with people. I was talking to somebody yesterday who uh you know going through a pretty rough time. Um but in time that you know hopefully they they get things squared away and and as it is staying in touch and building those relationships really does pay off in the long term.

I would agree with that. Um well, thanks, guys. I appreciate your last minute sales tips, your pro tips, and your tips on how not to screw up sales. All right, thanks for tuning in, everyone. We'll talk to you next week.

Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers.

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